By Stephanie Kannimmel, BSc PPE Student at King’s College London
Policy agendas are influenced by issues the public perceives as important. These are influenced by mass media, hence the importance of the stories that news sources choose to cover. Media dominance has been around since the golden age of legacy media, but has become an even greater threat with the dawn of digital platforms. As digital platforms and social media play an increasingly larger role in the way we get our information, two questions then arise: to what extent has the power been shifting from mainstream media to these new technology platforms, and how this should be addressed?
Legacy media and the shift to digital platforms
In the 1980s, legacy media was at its peak. Professional journalists gathered information, which was edited and chosen by editors. TV broadcasts would play at a set time of the day, and distribution was limited to a small number of broadcast channels and newspapers that dominated the media sphere. With the advent of the internet in the 2000s, news websites started to become their own editors and use their own platforms, but distribution remained primarily through legacy media organisations. It was not until the 2010s that the number of professional journalists declined significantly, and production and publication became digital first. The line between professional journalists and self-publishers blurred through a process referred to as mutualisation. News is now a continuous stream without publishing deadlines, and distribution occurs increasingly through social media platforms as news outlets begin to lose control of distribution.
Initially, many had a positive or utopian perspective about digital platforms’ rising prominence. Some cited this age as the end of the oligopoly of news production and the beginning of a shared venture in media. However, it has become clearer now: while the transformation of media and communications has been characterised by an age of information abundance, monopoly and dominance by digital platforms is still the case (and arguably even more so) in the new media environment.
Can mainstream media still shape the public agenda?
The rise and dominance of digital platforms in the 21st century has posed a prominent threat to the agenda-setting power of legacy media. Due to an abundance of information available on search engines and social media platforms, the loyalty to news values and focus on a handful of issues that characterises mainstream media may no longer be effective. As a select few digital platforms have begun to dominate the news arena, the number of people that get their news from legacy media appears to be declining. Legacy media’s power is further threatened by algorithms and greater choice in the new media environment that make it easier for people to access news that is tailored to them.
However, evidence has also shown that mainstream media and social media merge in agenda setting, and that people get their news from both. McCombs and Shaw (2008) highlight how audiences merge vertical media — characterised by objectivity and the aim to reach a large undifferentiated audience — with horizontal media, which provides special agendas for audiences interested in specific topics. For example, audiences today may use legacy media sources to get a sense of public news, such as by reading their local daily newspaper, and then turn to social media that fits their personalised horizontal interests for guidance on how to interpret events.
The evolution and implications of digital dominance
Although audiences may still get some of their information from legacy media sources, the monopoly of digital platforms has different implications, besides those for agenda-setting power, that cannot be ignored. Legacy media dominance occurred due to barriers to entry regarding specialist skills and investment in buildings and materials, as well as the aim for dominance in a geographic market or among a particular demographic. However, new media monopolists, primarily Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft (GAFAM), are much larger than their legacy media predecessors. For reference, in the fiscal year of 2019, Amazon made as much as the GDP of Pakistan.
Not being a market leader in the digital sphere brings even more vulnerability than legacy media platforms faced in the past, leading to digital platforms consciously seeking scale and dominance. Platforms are therefore even more prone to monopoly than legacy media companies, deriving greater economies of scale and benefitting from both direct and indirect network effects, creating even greater barriers to entry for new entrants than those that existed in the age of legacy media.
Digital platforms being more prone to dominance than legacy media, as well as their reliance on individual data, has been a cause for concern among many governments. Although some scholars argue that market dominance brings benefits to consumers and other businesses, the impacts of platform monopoly on democracy and equality are too significant to ignore. The power of shareholders and patents in GAFAM, as well as goods being offered for free online, benefits the very richest in society and harms the rest. Advertising revenue is increasingly dominated by companies like Google and Facebook, and the wealth from innovations is restricted only to GAFAM owners and shareholders due to patents and market power.
Such threats to equality and democracy have led some countries to focus on antitrust regulation to protect consumers’ data and even to attempt to break up GAFAM’s monopoly. Differences in antitrust regulation are present in Europe and the US. European antitrust laws focus on ensuring fair competition, outlined in the use of competition law within the EU. US laws take a narrower focus on whether market dominance creates demonstrable harm to consumers. The Biden administration recently appointed Tim Wu, a leader in the movement to break up Big Tech, to aid with antitrust regulation and advise their approach to the tech industry in general.
Considering the power that digital platforms hold, it is clear that while mainstream media may still have some power to set the public agenda, its financial sustainability is significantly threatened by digital platforms. Some level of regulation is necessary both to ensure the sustainability of mainstream media platforms, and more importantly, to uphold democracy and equality worldwide. However, the complexity of accounting for data, the debate whether the Big Tech should be treated as public utilities or natural monopolies, and the differences Big Tech platforms make this a difficult task.
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